


Surrogate

by battle_cat



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-07-29 10:52:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16262702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Eddie is gone, and for some goddamn reason, she is sitting here in a corner of the hospital stairwell, holding a dog that she’s reasonably sure is also an alien.“I’m going to find Eddie,” she says to the dog. “And”—I can’t believe I’m saying this—“I think I need your help.”





	Surrogate

Eddie is gone, and for some goddamn reason, she is sitting here in a corner of the hospital stairwell, holding a dog that she’s reasonably sure is also an alien.

The dog, for its part, regards her with more concentration than she thinks a dog should have, or maybe it’s just her fried brain making that up because nothing about this day has been fucking normal.

She takes a breath. “I’m going to find Eddie,” she says to the dog. “And”— _I can’t believe I’m saying this_ —“I think I need your help.”

The reaction is immediate and swift. Black tendrils snake out of the dog’s fur and wrap around her wrist, sliding around her hand and up her arm and _oh shit this is weird_ ; they move kind of like water and kind of like vines but they’re warm and alive and have _intention_ ; if she had any thought of backing out now that chance is gone; both her arms are incased in black goo up to the shoulder and it’s either under her clothes or ignoring her clothes because she can definitely feel it on her skin and it’s decidedly _slithery_ but that in no way prepares her for the feeling of it moving _inside her_. She chokes back a scream because she didn’t feel it penetrate her skin but it is most definitely _in_ her now; she can feel a definite _thing_ snaking and wriggling around what feels like everywhere at once under her skin. She claps both hands over her mouth and tries not to vomit because the deepest recesses of her lizard brain are yelling THERE’S A THING IN ME and trying to evacuate it by any means possible. The stairwell reels alarmingly under her and she finds herself curled up on the concrete floor thinking _don’t pass out, don’t pass out,_ don’t let some unlucky intern find you in the stairwell with a THING in you—

**FIND EDDIE**

The voice makes her yelp because it sounds human and male and _loud_ and like it’s right behind her, even though she already knows it’s in her head. It’s the voice of the thing that Eddie was hearing, the thing that’s now inside her.

At some point she had let go of the dog. It scurries up the stairs and out of sight.

**F I N D E D D I E**

“I know. I know,” she mutters, shoving herself up onto her hands and knees. “I’m try—”

She’s suddenly standing, even more suddenly lurching down the stairs, everything tilting and swaying alarmingly. She’s not thinking about moving her limbs at all and yet she’s walking; it’s making her walk completely independent of anything she might want to do, and no, she doesn’t like this at all.

“Wait, no, just—stop—one minute—” All her senses seem off kilter, balance and taste and smell and depth perception all doing things she doesn’t understand, and she’s pretty sure that if she takes one more step like this she’s going to puke—

“Just stop!” she yells, and abruptly the weird alien movement of her limbs ceases. She sits down hard on a concrete step.

**WE NEED TO FIND EDDIE**

“I know, I know!” If she doesn’t put her head between her knees right now she is going to hurl. “Just…like…gimme a sec, okay?”

**WE DO NOT HAVE A SEC**

“Dude, you are _not_ a good time,” she snaps.

**YOU ARE AN IMPERFECT HOST**

“Yeah, thanks, buddy.” The dramatic swoop of the stairwell around her is starting to slow down at least.

**YOU WILL DO FOR NOW**

**IF I STAY IN YOU TOO LONG I WILL HAVE TO EAT YOUR ORGANS TO SURVIVE**

“Um…can…can we not do that?”

**IF WE FIND EDDIE**

“Right. Okay. Fuck.” She hauls herself to her feet and slides abruptly to the left.

Just as abruptly, something stabilizes her balance and forcibly moves her hand to the stairwell railing.

“That’s really creepy when you do that.”

**DID YOU WANT A CONCUSSION**

“No. Okay. Fine. Shit. We’re going.”

 

Somehow, she is in the car and driving. She knows where she’s going—you don’t need three fucking guesses where Eddie ended up—but she honestly can’t tell if she’s steering the car herself or if _it_ is.

(It? He? They? Do aliens have genders?)

**WE HAVE FORTY-SEVEN OF THEM**

The voice makes her jump every time. And apparently she doesn’t need to be speaking out loud for it to understand her.

**NOPE**

**I HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS JUST FINE**

Great.

Her hands suddenly spin the wheel to the right without her permission, skidding them across two lanes of traffic into a sudden hard turn.

“Hey!” she yelps.

**THIS WAY IS FASTER**

“Not if we get pulled over by the cops.” Somehow talking to it…him…out loud feels less weird, as if the yardstick for weird hadn’t gone out the window miles ago.

**NOT A PROBLEM**

**I’LL EAT THEIR HEADS**

“You will not. Eating cops causes more problems than it solves.”

**BUT THE HEAD IS THE BEST PART**

**SO CRUNCHY**

“No eating people!”

**UUUUGGHHH FIIIIINE**

There’s a sickening Jello-y shudder she feels through her whole body, and she has the distinct feeling the thing is like…pacing around in there.

When she’s reasonably sure she’s not going to puke from that she mutters, “Y’know, you’re kind of a dick.”

**ANATOMICALLY I AM NOT**

**ALTHOUGH**

**IF YOU WERE INTO THAT**

A bright flicker of images plays suddenly in her head: a smattering of sex fantasies, the go-to ones for when she’s bored or Dan’s out of town, along with a couple of real memories in there. Eddie, tied to the bed in their old apartment—

**KNEW IT**

“Hey, stop that! Those are private. That is _not cool,_ man.” Oh and fucking hell, that sudden rifle through the personal porn library had come with a disconcerting spike of lust, too. “And it’s...very distracting,” she adds.

**YOUR SPECIES’ FEAR RESPONSE AND SEXUAL AROUSAL RESPONSE RUN ON THE SAME SYSTEM**

**THAT MUST BE VERY CONFUSING**

“It’s none of your damn business, is what it is. Do you want me to help you find Eddie or not?”

**I CAN MAKE YOU DO IT WHETHER YOU WANT TO OR NOT**

“I know.” She suddenly realizes she’s shaking hard enough the wheel is drifting. “I know. But. I’d rather you didn’t. I think…we can work together. I want to help Eddie, too.”

**IF YOU’D LEFT US TOGETHER HE WOULDN’T BE IN TROUBLE NOW**

**THAT BAD SOUND MACHINE REALLY HURT YOU KNOW**

Jesus Christ on a cracker. “I…am sorry,” she says with as much control as she can muster. “I didn’t know what was happening to Eddie, and I was scared. And…I’m still very scared.”

**I KNOW**

**YOUR ENDOCRINE SYSTEM IS VERY ACTIVE**

“So maybe cut me some slack, okay?”

**OKAY**

She doesn’t realize she’s stopped shaking until it happens, but suddenly she doesn’t feel like she’s going to jump out of her skin. She’s alert and focused, but the jagged saw-blade of nerves is gone.

“Wh-what are you doing?”

**I’M LOWERING YOUR CORTISOL LEVELS**

**DOES IT HELP**

“Um. Yeah.” It’s still pretty fucking creepy. But she does feel a little better, and the nausea and vertigo have subsided too. She takes a deep breath, and it doesn’t catch on the edges of an impending panic attack at all. “Thanks.”

**YOU’RE WELCOME**

“You know…you kinda sound like Eddie.” She’s still ragged enough that it seems kind of funny.

**_I CAN SOUND LIKE YOU_ **

And it’s her voice, distinctly her voice but the flat, canned way it sounds on a deposition tape, except pitched down an octave and spoken through a mouthful of gravel.

“No. That’s definitely weirder. The other voice is fine.”

 

She drives as close as she can to the Drake compound. They can circle around it on a public road, but the perimeter fence ringing the woods around the complex must be thirty feet high.

She pulls the car off onto a narrow shoulder hidden from the moonlight. Out of the car, the night air is frigid, and the fence imposing as she stares up at it. “How in the hell…”

**I GOT THIS**

“What?”

**BACK UP**

_“What?”_

But the creature is already moving her, walking her away from the fence across to the other side of the road.

**TRUST ME**

“Oh hell no—”

She moves, but this time it feels different from her normal body. When she runs her strides lengthen out with ropes of black goo, each step vaulting her through the air like ten, hurtling her up the steep embankment to the fence and then UP—holy—way, way too fast—

There’s a moment when she’s suspended at the top of the arc and she has a microsecond to appreciate that those are treetops she’s seeing below her and she’s about to go crashing through them.

She throws her hands up across her face but there’s a flat frond of goo already shielding her, ropes reaching out from…somewhere…to grab branches and push them aside or arrest her momentum, until she lands on the damp forest ground with no more than a graceless tumble onto her knees.

She staggers to her feet. Whatever internal cortisol slider the creature adjusted is back up to eleven. “What the fuck?” she whispers.

**OH COME ON THAT WAS COOL**

And…okay…she has to admit that it was a tiny bit cool.

**SEE**

“Just warn me next time, okay?”

Her head snaps to the right, toward the distant lights of the compound.

**HE’S THAT WAY**

**I SMELL HIM**

“You can…smell him?”

**SORT OF**

**NOT REALLY**

**SMELL IS THE CLOSEST HUMAN SENSE**

“Okay then.” She begins picking her way through the dark undergrowth. The moon is out but its light hardly penetrates at all down here, and the ground is uneven. At least she wore sensible boots.

“How do I, um, exchange you when we find him?”

**ANY TOUCH WILL DO**

She trips over a tree root and is nearly on her knees when the creature pulls her back upright. “Shit.”

**YOU ARE WAY TOO SLOW**

**WE NEED TO BE THERE NOW**

“I’m trying. It’s fucking dark in here, man.”

**NOT FOR ME**

**LET ME DRIVE**

**WE’LL BE MUCH FASTER**

A rough urgency tugs at her, and she’s not really sure whether it’s him or whether it’s the intuition that logic tells her she shouldn’t trust. All she knows is that she’s shaking again, and the underbrush is holding her back at every step.

**EDDIE NEEDS US**

“All right. Fine. Do your thing. What do I—”

**RELAX**

Before she even has time to laugh at that there’s a ripple that feels like it runs through every inch of her skin and then they’re moving, fast, unbelievably fast, vaulting over fallen logs and dodging roots before she sees them. Everything about her body feels longer, stronger, somehow liquid and taut at the same time, and she can see things she’s sure the moonlight would never illuminate. When she catches a glimpse of her hands as she runs, they’re oily black.

There’s a light up ahead in the trees. A flashlight.

She stops, coiled and still as a predator. She can move through the forest without making a sound now, even though her boots were crunching on every leaf before.

There are voices up ahead.

“You gonna walk me to death?”

 _That’s Eddie’s voice._ At least three men with him, by the sound of their footfalls. She creeps closer.

There’s the sound of a brief struggle, and that is definitely Eddie groaning in pain—something flares up in her—he’s _hurt_ and she’s not there to _fix him_ —

There’s a man on the edge of her vision, a man in a Drake security uniform, and now she has…tentacles? tendrils? something oily and black that reaches out and wraps around him silently and squeezes until he makes a satisfying _crunch._ The second man on the other side goes crunch too and it’s so _easy,_ these poorly-designed things, breakable with just a snap…

There’s Eddie. Eddie, on the ground, on his knees, with that fucking **SNACK** standing over him with a gun—

She doesn’t need to think. She sprints across the clearing in a couple of strides and opens her mouth full of teeth that were made for this and CHOMPS.

Heads really are the best part.

Eddie is there, he’s alive and he doesn’t even look too damaged, and she has no idea what she looks like right now but he’s looking at her with a mix of equal parts fear and awe and that is a _very good look_ on him, and she doesn’t need to think about the next part either; it seems like the most natural thing in the world to step forward and kiss him.

**ANY TOUCH, HUH**

She can feel the thing leaving her, slowly peeling the strength and power out of her body and flowing into him. Separating is not nearly so disturbing as combining, and maybe she even feels the very tiniest slightest twinge of loss.

Then she remembers that she just _ate_ someone’s _head_ …and caused unknown squeezy damage to those two other guys…and now that she’s not full of alien she is full of aches and bruises and scratches from running through the woods and she is fucking _freezing._

**ADMIT IT THOUGH**

Instead of over her shoulder, the voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere down the hall.

**YOU HAD A GOOD TIME**

As the last whisper of inky black slides away from her fingers, she’s pretty sure she can hear him laughing.


End file.
